I used to work for an ecommerce start up in the footwear and doing customer service for the was the worst for a few reasons.

1. They didn’t treat customer service as that much of a priority, they would say it was a top priority, but the customer service team was just me.
2. They poured all of their resources in to ppc and sales development, and would push random sales and promotions, let items go out of stock constantly, and just leave customer service (just me) to deal with it.
3. Customers expect more. They don’t know that management sucks, and that customer service is just a single overworked underpaid person, they expect Zappos quality customer service.
4. Not really a startup! What is innovative about a completely conventional product priced at market rate ? Nada.If you’re not doing something innovative, how is it a startup? I think a lot of companies call themselves startups to sound sexier on paper, but they are just new businesses.

It was really really untenable, but they laid me off because they felt I was better suited for marketing and (in their words) they ‘didn’t want to hold me back’, and they didn’t want to pay me a marketing manager level salary.